1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an Internet traffic measurement method, and more particularly, to a flow generation method for accurate and efficient measurement of traffic flowing in the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traffic measurement performed in the Internet has been mainly used to measure the scale of traffic for each line or device or to provide simple analysis results by monitoring utilization of each line using a management information base (MIB) or monitoring a level at which a monitoring method is slightly complemented. However, such simple measurement results are insufficient to understand the performance of the Internet.
Traffic measurement becomes the critical factor in researches on the Internet due to the sharp increase in the Internet users, the increase in scale of and the complication of Internet, and the increase in scale of and the variety of application of Internet traffic. Traffic measurement in the Internet directly involves designing and planning at an initial step of a network, traffic engineering at a step of operation of the network, provision of future high-quality Internet services, billing, and service level agreement (SLA). Also, traffic measurement is a task that should be basically performed in every network related work. Thus, there exists a need for researches on traffic measurement methods based on the characteristic of traffic measurement.
One of the traffic measurement methods that are actively studied is a flow-based Internet traffic measurement method. This method involves reducing the amount of measurement and more clearly recognizing the characteristic of Internet traffic by processing collected packets into flows (i.e., a group of packets having a common feature), thereby making it possible to provide the above-mentioned services.
In currently used flow-based Internet traffic measurement methods, there are a method as used in the Internet equipment company CISCO systems, Inc., in which a NetFlow function is implemented in a router, traffic passing through the router is processed into flows, and the flows are transmitted to an analyzing server. And there are various probes which is similar to the above method.
However, in these methods, processing of packets into flows having a common feature means that comparison and searching need to be performed on a packet-by-packet basis and, in some cases, not only headers of packets but also payloads of packets should be searched for in a real-time manner. Such operations mean a lot of processing time is needed in comparison to a speed of packet collection and independence between a speed of packet collection and a speed of packet processing should be guaranteed. However, there has been no proposal for measurement methods considering these characteristics.